You have been improving yourself for as long as you can remember.
Books on becoming better. Habits to install. Skills to acquire. Versions of yourself to grow into.
The current you is a draft. The real you is somewhere in the future, polished, finally arrived.
Notice the assumption underneath this.
The assumption is that what you are right now is raw material. Something to be worked on. Something not yet finished.
You are not a person. You are a project.
You did not always think this.
When you were three, you were not improving yourself. You were eating crackers.
The crackers were not preparation for better cracker-eating.
Somewhere along the way, the eating got replaced with optimizing.
The walk became cardio. The meal became fuel. The conversation became networking. The reading became professional development.
Each thing in your life got a job.
The job was to make you better.
Better at what, exactly, no one ever asked.
Run through it.
Better at your career, so you could earn more, so you could buy more, so you could feel more secure, so you could relax.
The relaxing never came, because by the time you got there, you had become someone who could not relax, because relaxing felt like wasting time you could have spent improving.
You built a self that cannot rest in itself.
This self thinks of your life as a workshop.
In the workshop, raw materials are turned into finished products. The workshop is loud and busy. It does not stop to admire the wood. It cuts the wood, sands the wood, finishes the wood, sells the wood.
If the wood asked to just be wood for a while, the workshop would consider it broken.
You are the wood.
You are also the workshop.
You have been working on yourself with no awareness that you were also the thing being worked on.
In China, twenty-five hundred years ago, Laozi noticed this.
He had a phrase for the opposite of the workshop. Wu wei. Non-doing. Not laziness. Not passivity. The mode of being in which things happen without being forced.
He wrote:
The Tao does nothing, and nothing is left undone.
Read that twice.
The Tao does nothing. And nothing is left undone.
Both halves are true simultaneously. The world arranges itself without anyone forcing the arrangement. The river finds the sea without consulting a map. The seasons turn without a project plan.
Your life has been turning the same way.
You did not make your heart beat. You did not arrange the way the leaves change. You did not engineer the small kindnesses people have shown you, or the small cruelties, or the way the light came through the window this morning.
Most of your life has been happening without you.
The part of your life you have been working on is a small sliver.
The rest has been doing itself.
You can verify this.
Try to control the next thought you have. Try to choose it before it arrives. You will find that thoughts arrive. You did not place an order.
Try to choose the next feeling. Same thing. The feelings show up. You receive them.
Try to choose the dream you will have tonight. You will find you have less control than you assumed.
The workshop is smaller than you thought.
Most of you is not in the workshop.
Most of you is just happening.
There is a Chinese parable about a cook who carves an ox without resistance.
Chuang Tzu told it. The cook does not force the blade. He finds the spaces between the bones. The blade has not been sharpened in nineteen years and is still sharp, because it never struck anything hard.
The cook is not improving the ox. He is not improving his technique. He is letting the cutting happen through him.
The workshop sharpens. Wu wei follows the grain.
You can still do things in this mode.
The work still gets done. The email still gets sent. The child still gets fed.
What changes is the underneath of it. The constant low-grade pressure to make this moment produce something for a future moment. That pressure can stop.
When the pressure stops, you do not become useless.
You become someone who is doing what they are doing, instead of someone who is doing what they are doing in order to become someone who is doing something else.
The whole of your effort to improve yourself rests on the belief that the you who would be improved is somewhere else, in the future, waiting to be filled in.
That future you is not waiting anywhere.
The future you is what this present you will be when the present arrives.
You cannot improve a person who does not exist yet.
You can only be the person who is here.
This is the part that sounds like resignation but is not.
Resignation says, I give up on becoming better. Wu wei says, the becoming was never something I was doing in the first place. The becoming was happening. The doing was a layer on top.
The layer can come off without anything underneath it stopping.
The grass grows whether the gardener pulls at it or not.
The gardener can sit down.
The garden continues.
What if you stopped trying to fix yourself for an hour.
Not as an exercise. Not as a practice you can add to the list of practices you are using to improve yourself.
Just stopped.
You would notice the workshop trying to start back up.
The voice that says, what should I be working on. The voice that says, this hour is wasted. The voice that says, you cannot afford to be unproductive right now.
Each voice is a worker who needs the workshop to exist to have a job.
If the workshop closes, the workers do not know what to do with themselves.
Let them not know.
The not-knowing is not the problem.
You are not raw material.
You were never raw material.
You are what was already finished, dressed up as something that still needed work, because needing work was the only way the workshop could justify its existence.
The workshop has been running on a fuel that does not exist.
You. As an unfinished thing.
You were never unfinished. You were just busy.
Put the tools down.
Notice you are still here.
The wood was never being made into something.
The wood is the thing.
Sources: Laozi, Tao Te Ching, 6th century BCE (traditional date). Zhuangzi, Cook Ting parable from chapter 3 of the Zhuangzi, 4th century BCE.